By ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ - Illinois State University
Psychology 392: Senior SeminarSpring 2019, secs 01 & 03Dr. CuttingBook Review Assignment, Rubrics, and SamplesFrom Syllabus: Pick, read, and review a book of your own selection Each student will pick a book to read over the course of the semester.? The books need to be psychology related.For each chapter the student will write a brief reflection.? The student will write a brief (~3-8 pages) review of the book.? The brief review and the reflections will be turned in together. (55 pts)Students will also do a presentation to the class about their book (35 pts)Rubric for the Brief Review and chapter summaries (55 pts)pointsReview30Book relevant to the assignment (psychology popular science) & Why you selected this book?___/ 3Review of the major points/messages of the book. (see the sample reviews below)What kind of evidence is given to make the arguments?Give examples from the book.What did you find most convincing? Most interesting?What psychological theoretical frameworks are being assumed/adopted?Do you think that the book has a solid scientific foundation?___/ 20Review of the authors’ overall conclusions___/ 2What were your overall impressions of the book?What were the major things that you learned from the book?Any questions that you are left with?___/ 3Would you recommend the book to others, and if so, to whom (“people who are interested in …”)___/ 2Chapter reflections & summariesReview of the main points of the chapterThoughts about the chapter contentQuestions from/about the chapters___/ 20General Writing(e.g., correct spelling, grammar, uses full sentences and paragraphs, etc.)___/ 5Total ______ (55 pts)Sample reviews (some from newspapers, some from blogs)THINKING FAST AND SLOWJim Holt (NY Times): Strawson (The Guardian): Shea (The Washington Post): Suss: Hossenfelder: Hallman: THINK LIKE A FREAKDavid Runciman (The Guardian): Vicky Pryce (The Independent): Malcom Gladwell: Ultara Choudhury: Rachel Kenworthy: are some examples with respect to books we read in a previous semester:THE INVISIBLE GORILLABy PAUL BLOOMIt is one of the most famous psychological demos ever. Subjects are shown a video, about a minute long, of two teams, one in white shirts, the other in black shirts, moving around and passing basketballs to one another. They are asked to count the number of aerial and bounce passes made by the team wearing white, a seemingly simple task. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a full-body gorilla suit walks slowly to the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and then walks out of the frame. If you are just watching the video, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But when asked to count the passes, about half the people miss it. This experiment, published in 1999 by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, is a striking demonstration of the zero-sum nature of attention. When you direct your mental spotlight to the basketball passes, it leaves the rest of the world in darkness. Even when you are looking straight at the gorilla (and other experiments find that people who miss it often have their eyes fully on it) you frequently don’t see it, because it’s not what you’re looking for. In “The Invisible Gorilla,” Chabris and Simons begin by talking about their study and its implications for everyday life. It is a mistake, they argue, to see it as revealing a bug in our software, rather than an inherent limitation. Our brains are physical systems and hence have finite resources. The real problem here — what Chabris and Simons call “the illusion of attention” — is that we are often unaware of these limitations; we think that we see the world as it really is, but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness.” They go on to explore a series of related illusions having to do with perception, memory, knowledge and ability, providing vivid examples of the real-world problems these illusions cause. Take memory. It fades over time and is distorted by our beliefs, desires and interests. Events that occur long after the original experience can distort your recall. Simply talking about something that happened distorts your memory; you come to remember not the event itself, but the story you told. This is why memories of significant events — where were you on 9/11? — are hardly ever accurate in the long run, and why people sometimes come to sincerely believe that their spouse’s anecdotes really happened to them. But we tend to think that memory is objectively truthful, on analogy with a digital recording. This illusion explains why we take eyewitness testimony way too seriously, particularly if the person is confident (studies show that even highly confident witnesses give incorrect identifications a surprisingly high proportion of the time), and we are often unforgiving when memories turn out to be wrong. Chabris and Simons give the example of Hillary Clinton’s description, repeated in the 2008 presidential campaign, of a 1996 visit to Tuzla, Bosnia, where she recalled landing under sniper fire and running head-down to get to cover. But reporters for The Washington Post soon dug up a photograph showing a calm greeting ceremony, where Clinton kissed a Bosnian child who had just read her a poem. Her tale of sniper fire generated considerable ridicule, with Christopher Hitchens (a longstanding critic of Clinton and her husband) concluding that she either “lies without conscience or reflection” or “is subject to fantasies of an illusory past” or both. Even Bill Clinton, in an attempt to defend his wife, noted that these remarks were made late at night (though this was not actually true) and that she was, after all, 60 years old. But there is a simpler explanation, which is that anyone’s memory of an event that happened 12 years ago is likely to be profoundly distorted. It is only in rare cases that others are motivated enough to seek out objective confirmation for our reports of our pasts, and only then that we learn how bad our memories really are. Other illusions discussed by Chabris and Simons concern knowledge and confidence. We tend to think that we know more than we do and that we are better than we are. We suffer from what psychologists call the “Lake Wobegon effect,” based on Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” (According to the authors’ own survey, 63 percent of Americans consider themselves more intelligent than the average American, a statistical impossibility. In a different survey, 70 percent of Canadians said they considered themselves smarter than the average Canadian.) Then there’s the illusion of cause: people tend to infer cause-and-effect when all that really exists is accident or correlation. Chabris and Simons also propose an “illusion of potential”: the belief that “vast reservoirs of untapped mental ability exist in our brains, just waiting to be accessed.” They use this to introduce a fascinating review of urban legends of modern psychology, including well-publicized claims that watching certain videos, like the Baby Einstein series, will make your child smarter; that classical music makes everyone smarter (the so-called Mozart effect); that older adults can keep their minds limber by doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles; and that people use only 10 percent of their brains. It turns out that none of this is true. Some interventions do succeed in improving our mental functioning. Chabris and Simons themselves point out that mild aerobic exercise leads to significant improvement in the planning and multitasking of older adults. But their overall tone is one of caution and skepticism. Toward the end, they quote Woody Allen: “I wish I had some kind of affirmative message to leave you with. I don’t. Would you take two negative messages?” I counted more than two. First, we are subject to powerful illusions about how our minds work. Second, these illusions are difficult to shake, even when they are pointed out to us in books like this. Third, technology may hurt more than it helps, since new inventions often tax our mental capacities even further. If we can’t eliminate our illusions, though, our awareness that they exist can change how we think of ourselves and others. It is tempting to see our tendency to get stories wrong or overestimate our abilities as reflecting arrogance and stupidity. But Chabris and Simons show that this is mistaken, and they end their engaging and humane book with the hope that a better understanding might help us temper these reactions. The invisible gorilla just might teach us to be more humble, understanding and forgiving. by David M. KinchenIf a person dressed in a full-body gorilla suit passed through a group of basketball players moving around and making shots, would you notice the "gorilla"? The chances are 50-50 that you wouldn't, according to Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of "The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us" and the creators of the famous "Gorillas in Our Midst" experiment.The experiment was conducted at the end of the 1990s when Simons had just arrived at Harvard and Chabris was a graduate assistant in the psychology department.?Dan Simons manned the video camera and directed, with some of the student players dressed in black and others in white passing the ball and moving around. The tapes were edited and shown to volunteers who were asked to count the number of passes made by the white garbed players, while ignoring any passes made by players dressed in black. The experiment was repeated numerous times in the dozen years since it was devised and the authors say the results are the same: Half the people viewing the videos don't notice the person dressed in a gorilla suit. Simons and Chabris say they wrote "The Invisible Gorilla" to make readers less sure of themselves, through the use of the gorilla experiment, published in 1999 in the psychology journal Perception and referenced many times since, including an episode of?the TV show "CSI" and the many other experiments and incidents described in the book. In "The Invisible Gorilla" you'll read about a cop in pursuit of a man failing to notice a fellow police office beating a black plainclothes cop; about Pittsburgh's most famous motorcycle-car collisions, the one in 2006 involving Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger on a Suzuki Hayabusa and Martha Fleishman in a Chrysler New Yorker. As a long-time motorcycle rider (I no longer ride, dreading the multi-tasking cell phone users in cars and trucks) who had a number of near-misses, I could appreciate the inevitable "I didn't see him" statement from the car driver. Roethlisberger, 23 at the time, was lucky, especially since he wasn't wearing a helmet (he was cited for that and not having the right license) and made a full recovery in time for the season opener in September 2006. Fleishman was cited and fined for failing to yield. About that excuse of mine for giving up motorcycle riding, "cagers" (car and truck drivers) using cell phones, Chabris and Simons back me up, citing overwhelming evidence that people can't multitask and maintain control, that even hands-free headsets don't reduce the distraction. We notice when other drivers are distracted, but we don't notice our own distraction because we think we're superior. The central truth of the book, the authors say, is "Our minds don't work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we're actually missing a whole lot."? Childhood autism and vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR)? The authors demolish the myth that vaccinations cause autism, a belief spread by an attractive blonde mom named Jenny McCarthy, not noted for scientific expertise, but rather for her Playboy photos. I recall a few years ago radio and TV personality Don Imus discussing the same subject. The result: many parents, for religious reasons and other excuses, are failing to have their children vaccinated, leading to an increase in dangerous childhood diseases and especially endangering children who can't be immunized because of cancer treatments such as chemotherapy they're undergoing. Playing Mozart to make a baby smarter doesn't make any more sense than the vaccination-autism connection, but parents continue to believe -- because we're tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement. The winners: marketers of such products. We think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the (usually false) ?assumption that people will notice when something out of the ordinary happens right in front of them.? Confidence is a bad thing, a costly thing, when we subscribe to the belief that confident people are more likely to succeed. They often do, but not for the reasons most people believe. This misplaced trust in confident people contributes to false convictions in courts (when a rape victim, for instance, confidently identifies the wrong man) and to the deceptive power of con(fidence) men like Bernie Madoff. If you haven't cracked a psychology book since taking Pysch 101, pick up "The Invisible Gorilla" and be entertained and enlighted. This book could provide material for an entire season -- maybe even two seasons -- of ?one of my favorite TV shows, Penn and Teller's "Bullshit."Moonwalking with EinsteinBy Marie AranaIt's hard to imagine a world in which all you can do with a thought is recall it: a world in which written words do not exist and the only way to hoard knowledge is to remember. That may sound like an extravagantly imagined story by Philip K. Dick, but once upon a time, long ago, before Gutenberg, before alphabets, before scribbles on cave walls, it was so. Memory was all the information we had -- and we were very good at holding on to it. These days, it seems, we hardly remember anything. We have gadgets that do it for us: day planners, GPS devices, cellphones that log every number we've ever called, tiny motherboards with gargantuan gigabyte capacities. We're lucky if we know five telephone numbers by heart. A recent survey revealed that a third of all British citizens under age 30 couldn't remember their home phone numbers without checking their mobiles. Thirty percent couldn't remember the birthdays of more than three family members. But the devaluation of memory has deeper cultural implications: Fully two-thirds of American teenagers do not know when the Civil War occurred; one-fifth don't have a clue whom we fought in World War II. Why waste brain cells on remembering when we can summon facts so easily on our cellphones? Now comes science writer Joshua Foer - a formerly absent-minded young man who became the 2006 U.S. memory champion - to argue that in exchange for scientific progress, we may have traded away our most valuable human resource. Can you name the 44 American presidents? Can you list the capitals of all 50 states? Chances are you can't. And yet if you can read this review, your brain may have the capacity to recall 50,000 digits of pi, permanently commit to memory 96 historical facts in the course of five minutes, maybe even memorize every line of Yeats's mammoth poem "The Wanderings of Oisin." "Anyone could do it, really," says the reigning world memory champion, Ben Pridmore. More likely, if you are like the rest of us, you will spend - according to Foer - a staggering average of 40 days a year making up for everything you've forgotten. Foer, who was born in Washington, is the brother of former New Republic editor Franklin Foer and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. He chanced upon the U.S. Memory Championships in Manhattan in 2005 while doing research for a story about Pridmore. "The scene I stumbled on," he writes, "was something less than a class of titans: a bunch of guys (and a few ladies), widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep, poring over pages of random numbers and long lists of words." One year later, after grueling months of training, Foer won that competition by memorizing a set of 52 cards in one minute and 40 seconds, breaking the American record. But the book that he offers us is far more than a personal chronicle of that triumph. Devalued though human memory has become, it is what makes us who we are. Our memories, Foer tells us, are the seat of civilization, the bedrock of wisdom, the wellspring of creativity. His passionate and deeply engrossing book, "Moonwalking With Einstein," means to persuade us that we shouldn't surrender them to integrated circuits so easily. It is a resounding tribute to the muscularity of the mind. In the course of "Moonwalking," we learn that our brains are no larger nor more sophisticated than our ancestors' were 30,000 years ago. If a Stone Age baby were adopted by 21st-century parents, "the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers." The blank slate of memory hasn't changed one bit, except that we've lost the incentive to use it to store large amounts of information. As one of Foer's fellow mental athletes puts it, in the course of ordinary modern life, "we actually do anti-Olympic training . . . the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes . . . and spends the rest of the time watching television." Foer introduces us to memory prodigies such as the young journalist S, who irked his employer because he took no notes but could memorize 70 digits at a time, reciting them forward and backward after one hearing. He could replicate complex formulas, although he didn't know math; was able to repeat Italian poetry, though he spoke no Italian; and, most remarkable of all, his memories never seemed to degrade. There are, too, master chess players who can remember every move of a match weeks or even years after the event. They become so skilled at recalling positions that they can take on several opponents at once, moving the pieces in their heads, with no physical board before them. There are London cabbies with such intricate maps committed to memory that their brains have enlarged right posterior hippocampuses. There is the child relegated to "the dunces' class" because he cannot perform school tasks well, although he can identify distant birds by how they fly, having memorized dozens of flight patterns. Foer sets out to meet the legendary "Brainman," who learned Spanish in a single weekend, could instantly tell if any number up to 10,000 was prime, and saw digits in colors and shapes, enabling him to hold long lists of them in memory. The author also tracks down "Rain Man" Kim Peek, the famous savant whose astonishing ability to recite all of Shakespeare's works, reproduce scores from a vast canon of classical music and retain the contents of 9,000 books was immortalized in the Hollywood movie starring Dustin Hoffman. When Foer is told that the Rain Man had an IQ of merely 87 - that he was actually missing a part of his brain; that memory champions have no more intelligence than you or I; that building a memory is a matter of dedication and training - he decides to try for the U.S. memory championship himself. Here is where the book veers sharply from science journalism to a memoir of a singular adventure. Foer enters the strange and hermetic world of mental athletes, the great majority of whom are white males living on the margins of society - jobless, eccentric, superstitious - who know each other's weaknesses and strengths as well as any Homeric hero might know his enemy. Foer learns to anchor memory to the visual, to shut out all sound when concentrating, to blinker himself. He masters the art of building memory palaces, on whose imaginary walls he hangs impossibly long lists of complicated data. The more vivid and lewd the associations he assigns, the more easily he can access the information. Numbers become people; images come alive; Foer remembers a sequence of three cards by visualizing himself moonwalking with Einstein. As Foer explains it, what makes our brains such extraordinary tools is not just the volume of information we are able to store, but the ease and efficiency with which we can locate it. Look no further than your own head to find "the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented" - a search engine of amazing proportions. No computer you can buy will come close to replicating it. In the end, "Moonwalking With Einstein" reminds us that though brain science is a wild frontier and the mechanics of memory little understood, our minds are capable of epic achievements. The more we challenge ourselves, the greater our capacity. It's a fact that every teacher, parent and student would do well to learn. The lesson is unforgettable. By ALEXANDRA HOROWITZWhen we meet Joshua Foer, his memory is “nothing special.” A year later, he is able to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than two minutes and the names of 99 people he’s just met. He has also etched in his brain images of his friend urinating on Pope Benedict’s skullcap, of Rhea Perlman involved in indelicate acts with Manute Bol, and of other things most of us would try hard to forget. Let it never be claimed that there is no cost to self-improvement. A mere millennium ago, being able to remember and recite a text verbatim was not a game or a party trick. It was an art. More than that, it was part of being cultured: a person without memory was a person without ethics or humanity. Today, memorization is limited to Shakespeare monologues and Robert Frost poems in high school. Phone numbers and friends’ birthdays are “remembered” by cellphones and computers. Indeed, much of our daily memory has been offloaded onto external devices. The advantage to this is clear: information is portable and searchable, and not taking up valuable space in our noggins. Until you lose your iPhone. Still, memory is intricately tied to identity; we are a product of our own experiences. What we perceive is shaped by what we have perceived before; what we learn is bootstrapped on past learning. Amnesia seems to many so horrifying because it robs us of our own autobiography, and thus, it seems, ourselves. If on no other ground, most Americans are joined in our shared desire to improve the curious, elusive faculty we call “memory.” Foer, a freelance journalist, stumbles upon the realm of memory improvement accidentally. Searching for the world’s “smartest person,” he settles on a marginal event called the U.S. Memory Championship as a likely place to find such a specimen. The reduction of intelligence to memory is questionable, but never mind: Foer, like the rest of us, cannot help being captivated by the achievements of the “mental athletes” who compete in these events, like memorizing 27 decks of shuffled cards in an hour, or 4,140 binary digits in half that time. “Anyone could do it,” these athletes claim, belying the countless hours they have spent training. Foer aims to prove it when he goes from standing on the sidelines at the 2005 U.S. Championship to throwing himself into a mental brand of George Plimptonesque participatory journalism. By 2006, Foer is onstage at the same event with three dozen other mnemonists, armed with earplugs and noise-reducing headphones to minimize distractions. In “Moonwalking With Einstein,” Foer charts his journey from observer to headphoned memorizer, with forays into the Renaissance “art of memory,” cognitive neuroscience, chicken sexing and the history of indexes. He submits to psychological testing and acquires a coach, Ed Cooke, himself a memory-games competitor. Meeting Cooke, who represents the crashing together of youthful exuberance and mind-boggling commitment to mnemonics, is one of the many pleasures of Foer’s book. This is a fellow who constructs a network of entrance tunnels to his own birthday party, through which guests must struggle on their bellies, in order to make the party maximally memorable. The art of memory is credited to the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was able to perfectly recall the scene in a banquet hall moments before the roof collapsed, simply by reviewing it in his mind’s eye. The “method of loci” assigns distinctive images to anything one wants to remember, placing the images in familiar rooms or buildings. Recalling, then, becomes a matter of traveling through those locations, or “memory palaces,” and noting the images assembled there. This seeming sleight of hand — memorize X in order to remember Y — takes advantage of a simple fact of human cognition: we naturally remember visual images. Take a moment to imagine your own living room; a detailed description of everything in sight is effortless. Translating your shopping list into something memorable involves choosing good images and good loci — and then concentrating on them. The less banal, the better. Quotidian scenes are forgettable. What snags the cells of our brains are disgusting, bizarre and novel images. Using a version of these ancient techniques, a past world memory champion named Ben Pridmore was set to prove he had memorized 50,000 digits of pi. (Trumped by a man who recited pi to 83,431 places, Pridmore spent the next six weeks cleaning the images of pi out of his memory palaces.) In joining their ranks, Foer develops various loci, including friends’ houses, his old high school, and Camden Yards. He mentally collects a population of images — often lewd or ridiculous — which he will assign to numbers, playing cards or whatever else he will need to memorize. (Hence his title, which represents the combination of images he uses to remember the four of spades, the king of hearts and the three of diamonds.) In this way, a long string of numbers becomes a farcical tour of fantastical images, distributed in a memory palace. They almost don’t need to be memorized, per se. Once you attend to them, it is hard to forget them. Dom DeLuise hula-hooping plays a pivotal role for Foer, as does an earring-wearing Incredible Hulk on a stationary bike. Irregular images aside, Foer’s missteps are few. Discussing the neurological underpinnings of memory, he repeats some commonly held myths about it, for instance, that obscure facts — “where I celebrated my seventh birthday” — are “lurking somewhere in my brain, waiting for the right cue to pop back into consciousness.” In fact, not only are many such memories lost for good, even the memories we do have are often quasi-fictionalized reconstructions. Foer inexplicably devotes space to attempting to convince the reader that Daniel Tammet, a renowned savant who memorized 22,514 digits of pi, may not actually be doing it naturally, but only by using the same kind of mnemonic aids used by Foer and his fellow competitors (would it matter?). And at times he seems to have lost some perspective on his endeavor, as when he states, without apparent irony, that the Memory Championship, begun “as a one-day contest” 20 years ago, “has now expanded to fill an entire weekend.” But Foer is too engaging to put us off. His assemblage of personal mnemonic images is riotous. He makes suspenseful an event animated mostly by the participants’ “dramatic temple massaging.” By book’s end, Foer can boast the ability to memorize the order of nine and one-half decks of cards in an hour. Yet he still loses track of where he left his car keys like the rest of us. He numbly types into his cellphone the phone numbers he does not want to bother to remember. And one can only imagine what he will do with the fantastical images that now people his brain. We cannot be too disappointed that Foer’s mnemonic immersion did not make him the world’s smartest person. Not everything is equally important to remember. And most things worth remembering are precisely unlike a deck of cards: memories of your own life are spindly, slippery things, interwoven and ever changing. But Foer has given us a hula-hooping Dom DeLuise, and perhaps the fortitude to try memorizing that favorite high school poem again. This time with pictures. By Tim RadfordThis is the book of a journey: young American reporter identifies a puzzle, and sets out to solve it, mostly by talking to the people who set him the puzzle – and therefore must have the answers – and then by trying for himself, and discovering he can do it.It's a good way to explore a certain kind of science, especially the essentially subjective science of memory. It's a good way to introduce a new readership to new research: the reporter becomes an innocent, a Candide figure, to whom things happen, good and bad; who listens to everybody, both the wise and the wise guys.The downside is that if you've already read a book about memory, you'll have been on some of the journey already. The upside is the reminder that discovery is fun.At its best, Moonwalking with Einstein is a delightful book. It begins with a young stay-at-home who goes out on an interview, gets to thinking distractedly about superlatives of strength and intellect, goes home again, searches Google for the cleverest human, and discovers "if not the smartest person in the world, at least some kind of freakish genius" who can memorise 1,528 random digits in one hour and any poem handed to him. It ends with Foer – who cannot remember where he put his car keys – in the finals of the USA Memory Championship, the product not so much of intellectual firepower as determination, technique and luck.Early in the story he observes astonishing feats of mental athletics at a memory championship – someone recites back 252 random digits as effortlessly as if it had been his own telephone number – and is told that "anybody can do it". He encounters Ed, a shambling 24-year-old from Oxford who becomes his mentor; he meets Tony Buzan, the trim 67-year-old English self-help guru who founded the World Memory Championships in 1991 and who insists the brain is "like a muscle": exercise it and it gets stronger.These twin starting points take Foer back in time to the classical world, and the first essay on memory, in a little Latin textbook from 82 BC; and to the legend of Simonides of Ceos, the poet from the 5th century BC who is credited with inventing the notional "memory palaces" in which contestants "place" the objects or abstractions they wish to remember, first having given them physical characteristics with which to recall them. The memory palace technique exploits the fact that we have a better memory for spaces, places and faces than for names and numbers: it's much easier to recall that someone is a baker, than that his surname is Baker.It also takes him to the laboratories of cognitive science, and to the literature of memory: to the famous Russian journalist identified in 1928 who could remember everything; and to those tragic victims of illness and injury who can recall nothing for more than a few seconds.He gets to know the psychologist who first identified the "phenomenon of seven" – the number of things you can keep in your head at any time, give or take one or two – and explores the still uncertain mechanics and neuroscience of short-term, working and enduring memory.He recalls Jorge Luis Borges's famous story Funes the Memorious. He explores the historic past: the traditions of memory that existed before the invention of writing. He contemplates the bardic tradition of recited poems; he reflects on Homer and the repetitive insistence on a sea that is wine-dark and a dawn that is rosy-fingered.He discovers, to his surprise, that learning a poem is harder than memorising a string of nonsense numbers or the order of a shuffled deck of cards. He crosses the Atlantic and puts himself under the tutelage of Ed, and gets to know the eccentric collection of souls who compete in the memory championships: "a bunch of guys (and a few ladies) widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep".Moonwalking with Einstein is huge fun to read, intellectually rewarding and chronicles a lot of drunk and nerdy behaviour. But what in the end does Foer gain from his newfound capacity for total recall under testing conditions? A good book, certainly, and a better memory – but not vastly better. He goes to dinner with friends and afterwards doesn't just forget where he parked his car: he goes home by subway having forgotten that he drove to dinner in the first place.Rubric for the Book Review presentation (35 points)pointsReview30Book relevant to the assignment (psychology popular science) & Why you selected this book?___/ 3Review of the major points/messages of the book. (see the sample reviews below)What kind of evidence is given to make the arguments?Give examples from the book.What did you find most convincing? Most interesting?What psychological theoretical frameworks are being assumed/adopted?Do you think that the book has a solid scientific foundation?___/ 20Review of the authors’ overall conclusions___/ 2What were your overall impressions of the book?Any questions that you are left with?___/ 3Would you recommend the book to others, and if so, to whom (“people who are interested in …”)___/ 2General Presentation(e.g., timing, talking to your audience, not just reading off of your slides, etc.)___/ 5Total ______ (35 pts)Sample presentations ?? (note: these folks aren’t writing for this assignment or the rubric. They are intended as sample book review presentations based on books that we all read and are familiar with. )Thinking Fast and Slow: – this one is a bit short, without any powerpoint presentation supporting it, but it gives you a sense of things – this one has a bunch of animations, so again it wasn’t designed to fit the above rubric, but it gives another example of a way to do a review presentation. It is mostly summaries of things from the book, without a specific recommendation – again short and no powerpoint, but a pretty nice example of a review with a brief summary and recommendations. - this is a powerpoint presentation. It is much longer and more detailed than I’m expecting for your presentation.If you do a google search for “reviews thinking fast and slow prezi” you will find lots of presentations. Some are reviews, some are summaries, some do a little of bothThink Like a Freak:I didn’t find nearly as many video reviews for this one (lots of interviews with the authors, but that’s different) - this one is mostly a series of short summaries of the different chapters, not as much review.I did find a few Prezi presentation reviews/summaries: are some examples with respect to books we read in a previous semester:MoonwalkingTwo part summary and review. About 15 mins in total: , ................
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